• COVID-19 UPDATE

TRICKS TO PROTECT YOUR TEETH THIS HALLOWEEN

The excitement of Halloween is back again this year – a little different due to Coronavirus, but also the same, with the usual abundance of sugary treats.

Seeing red and blue lips on “trick or treaters”, stained with the food colouring of sweets, right before bedtime is a little confronting for a Dentist.

Tricks to protect your children’s teeth this Halloween:

  1. Eat the sweets in a single sitting, do not allow them in the bedroom to be grazed on for days. Eat the lollies over a short period of time to minimise the number of sugar feeds you give the decay creating bacteria on the teeth.
  2. Eat the treats at mealtime while consuming other foods, the saliva is more readily available to help buffer the acid attacks created by bacteria eating the sugars.
  3. Try and remove the candy and leave the chocolate, chocolate has lower amounts of sugar. Sticky sweets will also hang around for longer increasing the risk of tooth decay.
  4. Rinse with water immediately to try and wash away excess food and lolly particles and use a straw if consuming soft drinks to help bypass the teeth.
  5. Brushing before bed is the most important time.

So lets all keep our distance and brush our teeth so 2020 can only get better.

 

Courtesy of the Australian Dental association, the  NSW Health has put out these guidelines to help families have a scary but safe time:

✓ Halloween should be a front-yard event, not a front-door event (keep it outdoors);
✓ Provide closed packaging for treats and instead of communal bowls, consider other ways of distributing treats like strewn along the front fence;
✓ Have hand sanitiser at the front gate;
✓ Trick or treat on a household basis (e.g. a supervising adult and children from the same household), rather than groups of young people together, with a maximum of 30 people gathering outside;
✓ Maintain 1.5 metre distance between people of different households – don’t all crowd together in a pack;
✓ Don’t share costume face masks;
✓ Stay home if sick;
✓ People isolating should not receive Halloween visitors;
✓ Practice good hand hygiene and use hand sanitiser after touching common surfaces;

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